Age of the Geek

 
T-Mobile used Zero-Rating, it’s super effective
  
     “Pokemon Go” is the hottest new app in the world and everybody is looking to cash in on the craze, including mobile phone network T-Mobile, who have announced that “Pokémon Go’s” data usage will not be counted towards the user’s monthly allotment of bandwidth.
     It’s a smart play for T-Mobile considering the data usage for “Pokémon Go” is relatively minimal. Unless you’ve left your job to become a full time Pokémon Master, there’s little danger that the app will put a significant burden on your data plan. For T-Mobile, the good publicity in this promotion far outweighs the practical costs.
     But is it good for the consumer?
     It must be, right? Even if the chances are good that “Pokémon Go” won’t tip you over the edge of your data plan, free is always better than not free.
     Well, not necessarily.
     What T-Mobile is doing with “Pokémon Go” is called ‘zero-rating,’ which may sound appealing to consumers, but its practice is a threat to net neutrality.
     We all remember net neutrality, right? I know you do, but for the sake of anybody reading this column that doesn’t, let’s go over it again.
     Net neutrality is the idea that all the data that flows through the series of tubes that is the internet gets treated equally. It keeps internet providers from setting up “fast lanes” for web services run by companies that can afford to pay more, which protects upstart websites from suffering a disadvantage when competing with multi-billion dollar corporations. Likewise, it keeps providers from manually slowing down the bandwidth of popular web services lest they pay a hefty ransom, protecting multi-billion dollar corporations, and their customers, from paying more than they should.
     The most famous example is that of Comcast and Netflix, where Comcast deliberately slowed down Netflix’s streams, resulting in poor performance for their subscribers until Netflix was forced to pay Comcast an additional fee to get their service running properly.
     For the most part, net neutrality prevents internet providers from using their position to strong arm a larger cut out of the internet economy than they are owed. While zero-rating is technically the opposite of that, the principles are still the same. Favoritism and discrimination are one-and-the-same as far as net neutrality is concerned.
     For instance, while “Pokémon Go” doesn’t have any real competitor at the moment, the game has blown the doors open for the augmented reality gaming market. Imagine if two competing games were released in the future and T-Mobile decided to zero-rate one of them. Even if T-Mobile wasn’t getting anything out of the deal beyond good publicity, that would still give the zero-rated game an unfair advantage over its competitor.
      The larger problem with zero-rating is the precedent it sets. The FCC has come down on the side of net neutrality when it comes to singling out specific web services for higher costs, but the rules on zero-rating are less clear. It’s easy to see how zero-rating can set the foundations for a new wave of arguments against net neutrality.
     Cable companies have spent millions lobbying for the right to extort money out of users at both ends of the internet. The only thing stopping them has been the overwhelming public support from people that don’t want Comcast downgrading the resolution of Netflix.
     Getting the public to argue against corporations giving them free stuff is a much more difficult proposition.
     This is the part where the “neutral” part of “net neutrality” comes in to play. If you want a fair internet, it has to be fair all the time. The only thing worse than internet providers spending millions to seize control of the web against the will of the people would be internet providers spending millions to seize control of the web with the people cheering them on.
     In the short term, free data for “Pokémon Go” may seem like a great deal. In the long run, it’s conditioning consumers to accept practices that will ultimately prove disastrous to their interests.
 
     Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and is decidedly not neutral when it comes net neutrality.